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LXer Feature: 31-Jan-2011

In the LXWR this week it is all about the desktop environments. Bruce Byfield makes a case for running Xfce, Dr. Tony Young wrangles KDE4's window manager into shape and Carla Schroder wants to punt KDE altogether. The Fedora servers get hacked, Python for newbies, LibreOffice 3.3 hits the streets and Glyn Moody states why Android will win the tablet wars. Enjoy!

Ten years in the making, the EFLs released their first stable revision this weekend. One of the things I mentioned in my Eight Tech Signs the World Might be Coming to an End was that the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries had reached a beta state. Something I mentioned briefly in my announcement about the Bodhi Release candidate was that it was now shipping with the EFL 1.0 libraries.

If you've been wanting to get involved in supporting Linux and other open-source projects with or without a programming background, or you have creative ideas how to get involved, see this thread.

KDE 4.6 was supposed to ship with a transparent Oxygen style but in the end it didn't make it "due to serious issues (notably with embedded widgets, such as videos) which cannot be fixed at the style level". But that doesn't mean you can't install Oxygen-Transparent. Read on!

Next weekend (5-6 February 2011) is FOSDEM, one of the largest gatherings of Free Software developers in the world. KDE will be in Brussels with a stall and as part of the crossdesktop devroom. KDE talks will cover: education, an introduction to Qt and Qt Quick, Phonon, KDE on Windows and mentoring. In the crossdesktop devroom, there will be other talks on topics such as application distribution and games development, which will be interesting to KDE developers too.

The script command is part of the util-linux-ng package and so should be available already installed in any distribution, or you should be able to easily add it.

Twice in the past week I have gotten into discussions with friends about the topic of processor architecture. One of these discussions was about the cell processor and the other is about the ARM chip.

Fuduntu 14.8-4 has been released. This release offers no new improvements to the distribution and instead focuses on fixing bugs to improve the existing experience. Barring any significant issues forcing an early release of 14.8-5, this release will be the last ISO release of Fuduntu 14 for the remainder of the first quarter of 2011, allowing the main focus of development to shift to Fuduntu 15.

Today the Bodhi team and I are happy to announce our release candidate (0.1.5) is now available to the general public. This disc includes a number of package updates, most notably Firefox beta 10 and EFL 1.0 stable release. Because a picture is worth a thousand words the following is a screen shot overview of some of the changes in the release candidate.

Point-of sale (POS) is the location where a transaction takes place. It also refers to the immediate capture of transactions and customer payment information when goods and services are purchased. This data can be obtained using many different devices such as a computer, cash register, barcode scanner, PIN pads, and magnetic card readers.

Mandriva Linux's latest release is testament to the work done by developers to make it one of the easiest to use Linux releases ever.

FUDcon:Tempe 2011 starts today. 3 days of tech goodness in sunny Arizona. Things kick off with the orientation, BarCamp pitches and the State of Fedora Address at 09:00. Presentation sessions run all day Saturday and Sunday. Hackfests start on Sunday afternoon with more scheduled for Monday.

Do you see what I see? Maybe, if you have taken the time to tackle color management on your machine. The major desktop environments for Linux give 90 percent of users all the tools they need to see all of their images in device-independent accuracy. You don't even need to buy special hardware. This weekend, pull up a monitor and see what all the technicolor fuss is about.

Two of my friends transfered out NIU this semester, both of them are running various forms of GNU/Linux on their personal computers. One of them is not so technically inclined and he asked me to help him trouble shoot why his Ubuntu system could not get an internet connection...

One of the best and maybe worst things about Gnu/Linux-based operating systems (distros) is the insane amount of choice that one has about the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and which desktop environment/window manager you can use to interact with your system. There are hundreds of Linux distros available that cost nothing to download and use to run your computer with. And there are many choices of GUI managers you can use.

The openSUSE community is celebrating the end of January by releasing openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6. This new development snapshot brings several prominent changes, including the final removal of HAL (the Hardware Abstraction Layer), the migration to systemd from SysVInit has been pushed back to the next openSUSE release, and it now incorporates support for Novell's WebYaST.

I've been reading a lot of good things about Bodhi Linux recently. It's a young (just a few months old) Ubuntu-based distribution that exclusively uses the Enlightenment E17 WM. (The name is appropriate because Prince Siddartha (later to be known as the Buddha) achieved enlightenment under a bodhi tree.)

Yes, I am one of those grumpy KDE 3.x fans who can't deal with KDE4. So I've been trying out different desktop environments and window managers to replace my beloved KDE, and it has been fun and enlightening.

The idea of one universal package format for all distributions has been batted around a few times over the years. One of the most notable was Ryan C. Gordon's idea of FatELF files. Reactions varied from supportive to skeptical to down right opposed. Well, it seems a new team from major distributions is coming together to implement a "common application installer API and infrastructure."

In Computer Science, emulation refers to the capability of a computer software or hardware to replicate the functions of another software or hardware. Hence, video game console emulators are programs that enable computers to imitate the behavior of different video game consoles such as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Game Boy (GB), Sega Dreamcast, and Sony PlayStation. To help you understand video game console emulators even more, you may check out this post: Play Classic Super Nintendo (SNES) Games on Ubuntu Linux.